Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work

Swimming to the Horizon is a look at the bottom rungs of the community mental health system, where clinicians with little experience or training often work with patients holding together lives burdened by drug addiction, severe psychosis, poverty, and generations of trauma.

Zak Mucha took over an assertive community treatment team created to provide twenty-four seven clinical services for a client population we typically only see on the local news when police interventions turn into tragedies. In Swimming to the Horizon, we learn that therapy is provided not merely in fifty-minute sessions but in those moments spent attending to life in flophouse hotels, emergency rooms, grocery stores, alleyways, and courtrooms.